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Questioningly Results: The Best Literary Facebook Status Updates

May 21, 2012

Last week in Questioningly, we questioned two things simultaneously: the enduring appeal of literature (as refracted through the lens of our relaunched books blog, Page-Turner) and the possibly momentary momentum fuelling the Facebook I.P.O. (as you may have heard, Mark Zuckerberg’s leviathanic social network went public on Friday). At the crossroads of those two concerns, a question sprouted: What would be the best imagined status update for a literary character?

The entries poured in. While Facebook itself was only up eight per cent in Friday’s trading, contest results were up nearly twenty per cent. From the first, we noticed an interesting trend. The breadth of world literature is vast, but there were some characters that were more trafficked than others. Call it a triumph of strong characterization or the irreversible commodification of art, but, for the most part, contest respondents were drawn to characters with clearly defined brands: Dorian Gray (@iamtomodea’s “Er. Does anyone know how to un-tag yourself from a picture??”); Holden Caulfield (@s4shangrila’s “Just discovered music by this swell band named Radiohead. Boy, do they GET me”); Anna Karenina (@diski’s “Anna Karenina is wondering if they haven’t closed this branch line down”); Mrs. Dalloway (@NisrineR123’s “Really excited for this party. I’m going to go get the flowers myself!”); Godot (@bonnaventure’s “Godot is really sorry he’s running late”); or any number of Charles Dickens’s creations (@amfasick’s “Mr. Micawber is managing a hedge fund in Miami”).

The easier it was to define a character in a short sentence, the easier it was to write a short-sentence-length status update for that character. The fictional personage who benefitted from this the most was arguably Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s philosophically inactive eccentric. There were many funny Bartleby statuses, including an imagined series from @TaylorCarman (“Scrivening [4:54 pm] More scrivening [3 hrs ago] “Oy so much scrivening! [1 hr ago] Screw this [Just now]”). And some readers used their tweets to extend the literature in question; the best example of this was from @lemoneyes: “Gregor Samsa had a long, discouraging day but is confident the future will look brighter in the morning.”

If most of the entrants went with big-name authors and their big-name characters, there were some sightings of rara avises: Tom Robbins (“Sissy Hankshaw is finding it hard to type,” from @pagfordpages), Mercè Rodoreda (“Colometa is about to let some pigeons die,” from @andreu_gonzalez), and even Eric Carle (@Bloomindc’s imagined status for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, “Eat, Sleep, Transform.”)

There were so many entries from so many readers that we are prematurely declaring this our best contest of May. The best of them got off clean shots at both literary and technological targets, like “Ozymandias started using Timeline” (from @SunGoneNova) and “Roderick Hudson is currently thoughtful, unaware that his fingers, slender, apropos to habit, press a morsel [cont for 3 para]” (from @joshualandy).

The winner was a great tweet by Sean Carman (@seancarman, who happens to be the brother of earlier great tweeter Taylor Carman), which not only went after one of the biggest targets in literary history but was self-aware on two fronts: “Captain Ahab is beginning to think the whale might be some kind of metaphor.” Congratulations to Sean. We had promised to give him a hundred billion dollars but our lawyers informed us that was satire.